The creation of Terry Kuntz, brother of Rob Kuntz, the beholder first appeared in Supplement I to OD&D, Greyhawk in 1975. Since then, the eye tyrant (as it is sometimes known) has become a very strong contender for title of Most Iconic Monster of Dungeons & Dragons. It's also one of my favorite monsters in the game. The first illustration of a beholder appeared on the cover to Greyhawk and was drawn by Greg Bell. As you'll see from the artwork that follows, Bell's version of the beholder is quite distinctive, having a smooth body, a sleepy-looking central eye, and a comparatively small mouth.
Tom Wham, in the AD&D Monster Manual (1977), takes a slightly different tack. His beholder looks to be armor plated. Its central eye is large and bulbous, while its mouth is huge. This is the first version of the monster I ever saw, so it's my default image of it.
A couple of years later, in 1979, The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album was published by Troubador Press. The book contained this image of the beholder by Greg Irons. In general, I'd say it looks closer to Wham's illustration than Bell's.
The next year, 1980, was when the first official AD&D miniatures appeared. Here's a beholder as painted by Ray Rubin, from the box art of the "Dwellers Below" set. Its appearance is quite close to that of Wham's illustration.
The actual beholder miniature from the set looks like this:
Issue #76 of Dragon (August 1983) includes the article, "The Ecology of the Beholder" by Ed Greenwood and Roger E. Moore. Accompanying it is this illustration of a beholder by Roger Raupp. Take note of its eye stalks, which looks a bit like the legs of a crab or spider.
A month later, in September 1983, the second episode of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series featured a beholder. Its eye stalks are snaky or wormy in appearance, while its mouth has the largest teeth of any version yet.
Citadel acquired the AD&D miniatures license in 1985 and produced a beholder figure. I don't know the precise year in which it was released. Though it's somewhat hard to tell from this image, the miniature looks pretty close to the Monster Manual depiction, right down to the plated body.
Toward the end of the 1e period, TSR released Waterdeep and the North (1987) for use with the Forgotten Realms setting. Its cover includes a beholder by Keith Parkinson. His version not only includes segmented eyestalks like Roger Raupp's but also upper and lower eye lids.
The cover to the Monstrous Compendium (1989) features a beholder by Jeff Easley. The armor plates are not present. Instead, the beholder appears to be very fleshy in appearance.
Meanwhile, the MC's interior gives us this illustration by Jim Holloway. The armor plates are back, as are the broad proportions of Wham's Monster Manual illustration (though the eye stalks look unique).
I have intentionally excluded all the artwork of beholders found in the Spelljammer boxed sets and modules, both because there's so much of it and because it's intentionally varied in keeping with its idiosyncratic interpretation of beholders. Consequently, I'm not certain the extent to which they're at all representative of depictions of these monsters during the TSR era of D&D. On the other hand, it's quite possible these depictions were influential on those that followed in the '90s and into the 21st century. If anyone has any thoughts on this particular point, I'd be interested in hearing them.
As usual, I've no doubt left out a lot of illustrations, focusing primarily on those I either remembered clearly from my youth or those appearing in products to which I have ready access. If you feel like there are notable ones I've forgotten, I'd be interested in learning about those, too.
The 1980 miniature beholder looks like he just accidentally insulted his boss and is trying to play it off as a joke.
ReplyDelete"Take note of its eye stalks, which looks a bit like the legs of a crab or spider."
ReplyDeleteI'm pretty sure that's one of the Beholder variants, not a regular Beholder.
It's possible, though there's no real indication of this in the text that I can see.
DeleteAlthough I began playing the game much earlier, I didn’t start GM’ing until AD&D2e and that was when I first purchased books beyond the PHB. The Monstrous Manual was the first monster manual I ever bought and the Beholder on the cover of that tome captured my imagination in a way that the DiTerlizzi illustration on the interior never did.
ReplyDeleteThere's nothing idiosyncratic about Spelljammer's beholders. Your own retrospective shows that they've never been consistently portrayed, and having SJ just provided a background reason for it in the setting. That's continued into the WotC era, although you don't see them showing up in the kind of numbers you did in 2nd ed SJ so the fact that there's whole shiploads of the things trying to commit genocide on fellow beholders with the "wrong" body type doesn't really come across.
ReplyDeleteObservations:
ReplyDeleteThe coloring book and the animated show went off-model and gave them eleven eyestalks, one of the few consistent details about these things (at least with "regular" beholders and not the many variants like the spectator and eye of the deep).
It's hard to be sure but I think Raupp's is missing a couple of stalks, which is more excusable than having extras since the things do get lopped off now and then and take time to regrow. Don't think I've ever seen a published encounter where a "beat up" beholder started with fewer than max eyestalks, which feels like a wasted opportunity to make it feel like teh world is alive when the PCs aren't around.
Unless we missed one earlier, it looks like Easley gets credit for the first heterochromatic beholder art, which is fairly common these days. I've had GMs who were consistent about what eye color was tied to each eyestalk's ray, although that strikes me as limiting considering how variable the rest of their anatomy is.
I would cheer for inclusion of the Beholder from SSI's The Eye of the Beholder and/or the cover from the SNES game of the same. I think they have a bit to say in slightly different directions.
ReplyDeleteFrom what I remember of the Spelljammer setting, the differences between different sorts of Beholders was actually canon and justified as the product of abundant mutations in the species itself, leading to wars between the various types. I thought it was quite an ingenious retcon.
ReplyDeleteThat was still canon in 3/3.5 and definitive Lords of Madness aberrations book, and AFAIK has continued to be right into 5th. Landlubbers don't tend to know the details because they don't encounter whole fleets of beholders trying to murder each other for having an extra joint in their eyestalks or something, and lone beholders planetside tend to avoid one another to avoid nearly inevitable fights to the death. The species is parthenogenic and one of the first things a clutch of newborn beholders do is flee their parent before it can decide they don't look quite enough like it does and kills them.
DeletePersonally I like it a lot. Not only does it neatly explain why the art is so varied, it also helps sell them as having deeply inhuman mindsets that most humanoids would call insane. Aberrations ought to be at least partially incomprehensible, they're pretty much Mythos spawn in D&D terms.
I think it's worth commenting that the Monstrous Compendium cover beholder seems to be heavily influenced by a critter from Big Trouble in Little China, which in turn, is often compared to a beholder.
ReplyDeleteDoes anyone know the history of the beholder concept? Was it based on anything in literature? The name “beholder” for a giant floating eye ball has always been such a cool idea for me, very evocative for an alien being.
ReplyDeleteThe most entertaining explanation I've ever seen lives on Youtuber Seth Skorkowsky's eponymous channel over here:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6EUjfRTOyo
Absurd on every level, but probably much funnier than whatever the real origin is.